by Robert Brown
“We were young, Flora and I, and obsessed with our own beauty. This new love was exciting, and it was taboo, and indulgent, and wonderful! And horrible, and hateful, all at the same time. But I had his attention again – this was something new I could do to get him excited about me again,” she said this as tears started to swell in her eyes.
“He brought her here to this palace on the beach, and here she stays lavished in luxury. We work, him more than me, I will admit. I age while I work by his side, but all the while she sleeps here on this beach forever young and beautiful when we return.”
“At first she was our indulgence together. While she indulged herself in our opulent success, and we indulged ourselves in this taboo love.”
Now her eyes went wild. “But it all went wrong! Have you seen? Have you seen how she looks at him!? She loves him, and he her!” She was growing wrathful, now, as we stood on the beach. Her eyes burned with anger, fear, jealousy, lust, love and hate. Tears and fire. It was a toxic mix of fuels, and it surged dangerously in her.
“He asked me if we wanted to leave her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it!” she said exasperatedly, desperate, like an addict talking about an addiction. “He asked me if I wanted to leave him with her, just us girls together and he alone, but I loved him and couldn’t! I am also not sure she appealed enough to me without him there to hold my interest – part of the thrill was the attention I was getting from him for this. I want her love, and his, but I did not want them to love each other! So I asked him to leave her, but leave her to only me. He agreed, and he agreed to not tell her, for she would never, ever forgive me if she knew I took him away from her.” She was panicking now with this mix of guilt and anger and jealousy. “And so he tells me he pretends for her benefit, but I think he is pretending for my benefit!”
Then her eyes went wide, and screamed angrily, “Look at them!” She was looking up toward the palace. There through the sheer curtains of the royal bedroom, fluttering in a sultry midday breeze were the flawless figures of a man and woman embraced. The woman’s back arched gracefully, and she threw back her long hair as he kissed her chest. Lilith screamed, “They lie! I knew!!” And she ran toward the palace.
I realized I hadn’t seen Calgori all afternoon, and I quickly scanned the beach for him, but couldn’t see him. Lilith was at a lower entrance to the castle now, and I knew nothing good could come of her storming in with her wrath, so I dashed after her.
Up the beach I ran, vaguely aware of the sound of propellers. I entered the castle, and in the dark I stumbled upon stairs. It was hot and the air felt stagnant and moist, but filled with urgency.
At the top of the stairs there were two imperial guards, with their massive tanned arms, uniform tattoos, and dark red turbans. “No guests in the Harem,” one said in an impossibly deep voice. I swear I could hear strange, inhuman yelling coming from the grounds outside the castle, and the guards must have heard it too as they seemed distracted, but they stayed at their posts. As their attention was on this sound, Lilith passed the guard to the royal chambers slowly and methodically. Only I saw that just past him she slipped a lithe hand into his belt and removed his massive knife. She disappeared into the room.
I then heard a young woman scream, and a man wailed, “My love…!” but he was cut off before he could say more. The guards turned and we ran down the halls together into the chamber.
In a room of white silk, three bodies floated like Ophelia, facedown in a river of blood.
I would eventually write these lyrics:
The Emperor’s Wives
In a deep dark forest kingdom
Under Banyan covered skies,
Lived a king with untold riches;
Jewels, gold, and two fair wives.
Every night he indulged his fantasies,
enjoyed his wives, and went to sleep.
As he slept his wives kept secrets,
holding hands under the sheets.
Each dark day in his ancient palace,
The Emperor sat on his throne of gold.
while his young wives explored bright gardens,
eyes met eyes and hands did hold.
One bright day in the dead of summer
a pretty young wife saw a look of love
on her lover’s face towards their husband
fires burned jealous; she’d lost her love.
One hot night in the dead of summer
the Emperor’s wife stole a magi’s blade
crept into her lover’s chamber,
and as they slept her lovers she slayed.
THE WRATH OF FATE
We stood in this palatial room of white, in astonished horror, the guards and I. These deaths changed so much about the world that we were briefly immobilized, with no clue what our next move should be.
When I realized that this new turn of events wouldn’t likely change my incarceration without a little personal liberation, I began to back slowly away from the circle of guards. Just at that moment, the door of the room filled with armed soldiers. They wore the black and silver of the Imperial Navy. The last man who entered was powerfully calm. He had a white beard and huge bushy black eyebrows, and he wore the uniform of a Grand Admiral.
Walking straight to the nearest guard, he growled, “Due to the unforeseen death of the Emperor.” Had he said unforeseen ironically? “I am assuming command. You are hereby relieved of duty. You will be taken to trial, and then punished for the death of the Emperor Victor Joseph the Third.” The soldiers placed the Imperial Guards and me in restraints.
“I’ve survived the Change Cage once already,” I said boldly, while thinking, Why am I talking!? Shut up!
“I find Cages inefficient means of removing filth from the population,” he snarled back. “You will be tried, found guilty, and executed. Before dawn.”
Soldiers took me and the guards outside, where we found a military airship in a yard littered with the bodies of the Emperor’s menagerie and many of his guards. Zebra, giraffe, gazelle, and a hundred other beautiful beasts lay dead amongst the Emperor’s sentinels. How could they have had time to do all this, let alone know about the Emperors death, and be here at this exact moment? I wondered. Then it occurred to me. The Chronofax! If he had access to it, he could send himself a message of the Emperors death after it had occurred! He would then have his soldiers in place at the exact time of Victor’s death!
Our cuffs were latched to an iron fence, as the air frigate lowered its boarding ramps. As I stood chained and at gunpoint, it struck me that two things did not make sense. First, the tesla towers were not flashing. They must have been disabled for the Admiral’s frigate. The second thing was I was hearing propellers, but the frigate’s props were not turning.
Then I heard a massive Ploom, and saw familiar shockwaves ripple across the gas bag of the frigate! The warship was taking fire! Ploom, Ploom! I heard again, and one of the shots punctured the bag and it began to deflate.
Most of the soldiers now ran away from their airship, firing rifles into the red-black evening sky. Only three riflemen remained to guard us. I noted the point of impact on the frigate’s gas bag, and turned in the direction the shot had come from. The Ophelia was cresting the top of the palace! In she swept, sideways from the sea, broadsides blazing!
The Admiral strode out of the palace in a rage shouting orders. As he came past us, he said, “Kill the prisoners. To hell with politics, this is my reign, now!”
The three infantry men turned their guns on the first three of the Imperial Guards, and fired. It happened so fast, there was no time to do anything. The shots hit the massive guards square in the chest, and none of them flinched.
“Reload!” yelled their sergeant, as they slid back the rifle bolts. “Aim for the head. Ready, aim, fire!” And this time the massive imperial guards fell limply forward, faces burst open. They swung head down, hanging from their cuffs on the fence.
I, and the other two guards began to pull at our chains, and kick at the f
ence, as the sergeant again yelled, “Reload!” When loaded, they turned the guns back towards us. The reality of the situation seemed clear. I stood in a field of dead, chained to a fence with the dead. I thought my fate was sealed.
The sergeant yelled again, and with rifle barrels so close I could smell the powder, I heard “Ready! Aim!”
But before he could yell “fire!” I hear a familiar sound overhead, Screeeee-chika-chika-chika-chika!!! Our captors looked up to see a seven-foot brass man fall amongst them. Gyrod swung his bar twice, and the soldiers folded in horrific ways and flew across the grass.
Then with a easy pinch of two fingers, Gyrod crushed the chains between our cuffs. “Follow me, Captain,” he said in his comfortingly familiar, rasping voice. There was a large hole in the side of his head, but he seemed fine.
“How are you alive!?!” I asked in wonder.
“Oh, Father didn’t put anything too important up there. When I was shot in the Cage, I just pretended,” he said.
The Ophelia had dropped altitude, and her underside crowsnest was nearing the ground. I motioned for the recently unemployed Imperial Guard to follow, and the massive hulks of men ran with Gyrod and myself towards my ship. My ship - I need to never leave her again! I thought.
The crowsnest was now in the grass before us, as the enormous ship was skillfully piloted from overhead. Whoever was at the wheel was much more precise the I was! Gyrod, the guards and I leapt in and Immediately the ground fell away as the massive vessel lifted into the air. The sea stretching out in front of us beyond the palace, and knew I would be glad to see the last of this twisted center of a dying world.
But a second later, we heard a massive “Crack!” as the tesla towers fired in unison. This flash of wickedly precise lighting lit the scene of chaos below us as it set our beloved Ophelia on fire!
We climbed the rigging as the ship came about, and headed out to sea, but as we climbed the thick wooden planking of Ophelia’s underbelly was burning horrifically, and ropes fell around us in a shower of ash.
Luckily, the rope ladders spread to the outer rails as they went up, so we could, in theory, get on deck without having to contend with the fire. But the heat from the fire of Ophelia’s under flanking was setting our rigging ablaze. One of the Imperial Guards ropes burnt through, and he fell ten feet before being caught by Gyrod. He was lucky the Automaton was there, as few men could have stopped the fall of such a massive hulk as he.
The lower mast holding the crows nest burned through, and as it fell it pulled our rigging taut with a snap. This nearly shot us from it like a slingshot, but we held.
Behind us a dozen massive warships were clearing the tesla array.
We climbed the rigging in the nick of time. In fact, I saw the lower mast and crow’s nest fall free as I climbed over the rail.
On deck I saw perhaps the most horrific site of my life. Most of the crew lay charred on the deck, bodies burning, while the sails and airbag above us was covered in flames. It was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, everything was ablaze, and I recognized some of my friends burning on the deck around me. We had been lucky down on the crows nest – the teslas had hit deck level at full force.
I ran to the helm where Daniel barely stood clinging to the wheel. His clothes were burned, still burning in spots. He was pulling desperately on the inclinometer. I joined him, and together we spun it futilely. The Ophelia was starting to fall.
Then we heard a whistling sound from behind us, and I glanced back to see a volley of airborne missiles impact our gas bag! A series of two dozen explosions sequentially incinerated it. The aft deck was now swallowed in flames, and our sails and gas bag flapped, deflated, like the last flag of a defeated revolution.
And then we fell.
Down we plunged; A fiery ball, a skeletal frame of ash.
With air bags burst at three thousand feet, all our hopes were dashed.
Nothing could keep airship aloft, so down we crashed.
Five hundred fathoms down we fell, towards briny deep we splashed!
~ Excerpt from the song The Wrath Of Fate.
The Ophelia fell like a brick, and charred bodies lifted into the air as she did. Daniel and I held the wheel now just to stay aboard, there was no hope in steering.
We hit.
Our ship, as massive as a six storey building, hit the ocean with the force of a three thousand foot drop. It slammed into the ocean like it was hitting a wall of stone. Water cracked timbers, and ashen bodies bounced and broke on the deck like ceramic dolls.
At the exact moment we hit, there was a massive burst of pink smoke from the side of the ship as each Chrononautilus orb burst from our impact with the sea. This cloud spread at an unrealistic speed across the deck and up into the sky. Whatever it hit it froze in mid-air. Men snapped to a halt mid-leap, bodies froze horrifically in the air, swinging ropes and lanterns locked at unnatural angles, and fire froze in place.
The pink clouds then turned to gray, and we were in a thick fog, still frozen in place. As I hung there, upside down, I could see Daniel’s shoulder was badly burned, and his face was too covered in ash to gauge. Being that still and dirty, he looked inhuman. Dead. My only clue that he was still alive was that his hands still grasped the wheel. I could see other bodies in pieces, or burning.
Then an overwhelming sense of horror brought pain to my face and chest. Where was Kristina? Where were the children? If they were below deck, they would be crushed by this impact. Above deck, and they would be among these charred bodies. The thought wrenched my chest from the inside – this thought was the worst pain I had endured all day.
Slowly, the fog started to lift, and the things on deck dropped. As time began to slowly creep forward, massive waves rose up around us like walls. Finally, all motion snapped back to full speed, and the walls of water crashed around us, engulfing the deck, and crew, the Ophelia, and myself.
As suddenly as the waves had swallowed us, they released us, and withdrew. I could not sit up, but with one hand I brushed water from my face, and looked around. The deck was washed clean, and the fires were completely quenched. There was nothing above us now, no gas bag. Only stars.
“Thank god the kids weren’t onboard for that!” said Daniel. And I went limp with relief and laid back, drenched with warm salt water.
I stayed there for only a second, looking at the stars, when the stars were interrupted by large, black, growing shapes. Things were falling. Soon, the severed fuselages of six massive steel warships plummeted through the sky and plunged one by one into the sea around us, and the sea swallowed them wholy as they hit.
When our Chrononautilus burst, time had been frozen in a huge sphere around us, and the rest of the world kept moving. The wrath of fate is wicked, and as fate would have it the edge of this field fell midship in the attacking armada, severing them.
The Ophelia started her life as a sailing ship, and her wooden hull had survived the impact of the waves. It now held us afloat. But the steel fuselages of the naval frigates were heavy, and not water tight. The ocean swallowed them and never let them go.
We slept where we lay, too wounded and exhausted to move. The warm ocean rocked us gently in a way that was nostalgic to the way the Ophelia used to swing on her rigging. I woke from time to time and stared at the moon.
Finally, I opened my eyes to a pink-golden dawn. As the sun rose slowly over the Caribbean sea, Daniel and I walked slowly around the deck, taking inventory of who had survived.
Gyrod was there, and nearly unblemished. In fact, during the night while we were collapsed, or lay dying, he went silently around deck pulling crew out of immediate danger, or nursing those he knew how to help. He was now sitting next to a large chest he had pulled up from below deck, and was trying desperately to dry himself with cloth from it, for fear of rust.
The two Imperial Guards had survived, although one had massive burns to his face and shoulders, and the other had one eye that would never open again.
And speaki
ng of cyclopses, Mongrel had been so drunk below deck that the impact left him fairly uninjured, although his smell hinted that he had been sick on himself. This might have happened before the fall, however, knowing him.
Timony, the little clockwork doll was there as well. Much of her skin had been burnt off, and she was terribly broken, but she could still speak. Hopefully, she could be fixed.
Calgori had been picked up down the beach while Lilith and I talked. He’d been below deck during the fall. When he saw the deck and sails set ablaze, he warned as much of the crew as he could, and then managed to stow himself in a sea chest of uniforms before we fell. Jean Paul pulled him alive, but unconscious, from the box and carried him on deck. When he woke he looked and moved much like the older Calgori I had known.
We saw no more of the Grand Admiral’s Navy that month. My guess is he had seven ships at Tulum City. The Ophelia had incapacitated the first as they rescued me, and the final six were severed as the Ophelia fell into the seas. It would take the Admiral himself a good long time to get to any Naval bases he might have, and that bought us our escape.
